The cry came late one afternoon: ‘A spout, a spout! There it blows!’ And all across the main deck those of the crew who had served on the whaling fleet before the war raised their heads and hurried to the rail, the fire of old battles lighting in their eyes.
Dow went too. He’d seen whales often enough during his years on the Snout, but he never tired of the sight. Now, off to the north-west, he beheld the telltale feathers of spray that marked their spouting. Whales. A whole pod of them. On the surface.
Had this been a whaling ship, such a sighting would have initiated a frenzy of activity as boats were launched and harpoons readied, and fires lit under the try pots, ready to render down the blubber of the giant beasts to liberate their precious oil.
But the Snout was no whaling ship.
‘Keep us well south of them, helmsmen!’ called the captain, who then watched in silence with the rest of the crew as the feather spouts passed by to the north, and finally vanished.
They saw no more whales that day.
But that night the songs began.
Whale songs; piercing, whistling, lilting cries that came not through the air, but through the hull of the ship, reverberating from the surrounding water. Out there in the deep and dark, the great creatures were singing each to another in their mournful language, infinitely sad and strange to the human ear, but beautiful too.
What might they be calling? No one knew, but all night the haunting cries accompanied the Snout, keeping sleepers awake, entranced beyond weariness by the near-meaning of the songs. The sounds faded at last with the dawn, but returned the following night, and then the night after that, until they became as natural to the crew as the rustle of water against the hull, and the slap of canvas from aloft.
By day, more and more whales appeared on the surface, sometimes merely swimming steadily on their way south, at other times rolling and playing and leaping spectacularly into the air.
Some were Oil Whales, so named because they were the breed from which the prized liquid was harvested; seventy feet in length and fearsome with their great square foreheads that could ram and stove in a ship, and with their many-toothed jaws, twenty feet long, that could bite boats in half. Others were Green Whales, enormous beasts measuring as much as a hundred feet and more, but which were gentle for all their size, lacking rams or teeth, and which were not hunted, for they bore little oil.
But the whales that interested Dow most were even larger still – and more mysterious, for no ship had ever been able to capture one. These were known as Deep Whales; true giants that grew to over a hundred and fifty feet in length, lip to tail.
The Snout chanced upon a rare pod of them one calm afternoon, heralded by a cry from the lookout – ‘Deep Whales! Deep Whales!’ – that brought Dow and many others once more to the rail.
There was little to see at first, for the whales were not breaching or spouting. Indeed, one of the mysteries about Deep Whales was that they seemed never to spout, and could remain submerged indefinitely. Perhaps they did not breathe at all, and were not even warm-blooded: no one knew. But soon great ripples and shadows were visible across the water, huge silver shapes just under the surface, coming fast on a cross-course.
If they noticed the ship at all, they were quite undaunted by it, being not much less than it in length, and far swifter. For an instant indeed it seemed they might ram the Snout out of sheer heedlessness; but at the last moment they dived slightly to pass under the hull, rolling as they did so, as if to better display themselves to the watchers above. First, the immense, sleek, grey-headed males, their bared teeth flashing like gold blades; then the smaller females, their wise, ancient eyes staring up through the clear water; and lastly the calves, darting playfully in the rear. Even the calves could have swallowed a man whole, and if one of the bulls had decided to butt the Snout in passing, the ship might well have been crippled.
But Dow felt no fear, so serene and sure were the creatures, and so indifferent to the humans above them. Instead, a strange sadness possessed him; and then a wave of longing for his homeland, followed by a terrible sense of doubt and guilt.
At first, he couldn’t understand why the whales had triggered such feelings. Then the memory came, bittersweet, of days long ago, upon the great bay of the Claw. Yes. Of course. Dow lingered a moment in recollection, then as the last stragglers of the pod passed beneath the ship, he turned and crossed to the far rail to catch a final sight of them – and happened upon Cassandra there, also watching.
The laundress was less of a stranger now, since their midnight discussion. She had resumed dining in the Great Cabin with everyone else, and on the occasions she and Dow had been thrown together, they’d talked almost with their old lightness and ease.
He joined her at the rail thus, but so intently was she watching the whales as they receded southward, she didn’t notice him there at first.
‘Now who’s daydreaming?’ he asked.
She started slightly, then looked at him with a rueful shake of her head. ‘Yes, I suppose I was.’ She glanced after the whales. ‘Actually, I was wondering if we could still turn and make it all the way back home, if one of those things put a hole in the hull.’
So wistful was her tone, Dow said, ‘You almost sound like you hope it happens.’
‘Oh, no . . . I’m not that homesick.’ Her denial was light-hearted, but something deeper flickered in her eyes; a doubt, a hesitancy, a pain?
‘I was thinking of home too,’ Dow confessed. ‘Because of the whales.’
‘You mean New Island?’
He nodded. ‘Years ago, when I was learning to sail on the Claw, I used to see great shadowy things swimming far down below. I asked the old fisherman who was teaching me what they were, and he couldn’t tell me. But I think now they were Deep Whales. Any other kind of whale would have surfaced sooner or later, but they never did.’
Cassandra was watching him uncertainly.
‘That was a terrible admission for the old man to have to make,’ Dow explained. ‘A lifelong fisherman, and he couldn’t even identify a Deep Whale – a creature that anyone on this ship would recognise instantly. But no one in Stromner could do it; they’d never been to sea, because the Ship Kings forbade it.’
She pondered this, then fixed him with a serious look. ‘You’re worried you’ve made the wrong choice, coming out here rather than going home to New Island? Is that what you’re talking about?’
She knew him well, Dow had to admit. It was exactly such a fear that had waylaid him as he’d watched the whales; that by coming on this voyage, necessary though it was, he was avoiding his true responsibilities: the suffering of his own people. ‘Maybe,’ he said.
Cassandra was silent a moment more. Then, her gaze faraway, she said, ‘I don’t think you made the wrong choice. I think you chose the best of two bad options. Sometimes that’s all we can do.’
‘Two bad options?’
She blinked. ‘I just mean there was no certainty either way. If you’d gone home to New Island you might only have fallen in battle there. And out here . . . well, the dangers are obvious enough.’
She’d meant something else, Dow was sure. But he saw no use in pressing her about it. Perhaps it was only some dilemma of her own. Anyway, she was right, he should not be second guessing himself now. It was much too late to turn back.
He said, ‘Our pilot is convinced that one more trial at least lies ahead of us, before the Wilderness is crossed. And that it will come from below.’
‘The abyss?’ she asked.
‘You’ve seen the map?’
Cassandra nodded. ‘Monsters of the deep that riseth to feast upon them,’ she quoted, a note of awe on her voice. ‘Do you think such things exist?’
Ah now, that was a vexed question. Ever since his first sight of the ocean, Dow had been fascinated by tales of great sea monsters; not shapless things of slime like Rope Fish, but armoured titans rising from the depths in roaring cataclysms, gigantic creatures that could coil about a shi
p and crack it apart, or flip it like a toy, or even swallow it whole . . .
But did he believe such tales?
‘I don’t know,’ he mused aloud. ‘It seems against reason, and nature too. How could anything grow truly monstrous without collapsing on itself?’
Cassandra laughed. ‘You’re asking me? I’m not the mariner. If you don’t know yourself, you should seek out the captain. For all his flaws, he has sailed more widely than most, and even though he is no scholar I have heard him on occasion speak quite learnedly of sea monsters.’
Dow took note. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said
*
And he did.
Late that very evening, as whale song keened and whistled mournfully through the sleeping ship, he made his way to the Great Cabin. Captain Fletcher was known to be in the habit of staying up far into the night in solitary occupation, and so Dow found him now. Maps lay unrolled upon the table, along with navigational tools and the ship’s log, but the captain himself was sitting in a chair by a stern window, feet resting on the sill as he stared out at the ship’s wake, sipping rum from a bottle.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said Dow.
The captain craned his head about to identify the intruder. ‘Ah, Young Admiral.’ He frowned owlishly, but then proffered the bottle. ‘Care to join me? A last tot for the condemned man?’
Dow shook his head. It was against regulations to be drinking beyond the daily rum issue, but of course captains were a law unto themselves. ‘Am I a condemned man, sir?’ he asked.
Fletcher stared at that, then said easily, ‘Well, aren’t we all on this fool voyage? Like as not we’re none of us fated to survive it.’
The man was drunk, Dow realised. ‘That’s not what you told the crew.’
‘Ha. I told the crew what they needed to be told. I’m no traitor, I follow my orders, even if I have to lie to do it. But let’s not fool ourselves.’
The man was very drunk. But Dow pressed on anyway, taking a seat at one of the nearby desks. ‘Sir, do you mind if I ask a question?’
‘Ask away, lad, ask away.’
Dow wasn’t quite sure how to put it. He pursed his lips. ‘I’m told you have particular knowledge of the great creatures of the deep.’
‘Ah, now.’ Fletcher stared wisely into the mouth of the bottle. ‘Why not say their name, lad? Monsters they are, monsters of the abyss.’
‘Are they truly so terrible?’
‘I’m sure you’ve heard the same tales as I. Are you saying you don’t credit them?’
Dow shrugged. ‘It’s just that I’ve never met anyone who has seen such things first hand. The tales always come from too long ago or from too far away.’
‘From here, Mr Amber,’ the captain corrected, with a dark glance out the window. ‘Those stories come from here, from this very ocean.’
Dow’s stomach curled as a lilting whale cry rose and fell. Beyond the open window, the ship’s wake gleamed as a pale streak upon imponderable blackness.
‘But why only here?’ he asked finally. ‘Why are these things not known in the Middle Sea? Is it because the water is so deep here? But why should that allow creatures to grow monstrously large?’
‘Good questions! Why indeed!’ The captain swigged again, then wiped a hand across his bearded lips and squinted into the distance, consulting his memory as if through a fog. ‘Well, I met a man once who thought he had the answers. A Ship King, if you can believe it. But a wise fellow. A scholar. This was long ago. He’d commandeered my whaling ship to carry out a survey of the Twin Isles coasts. It took us many months to complete, and we talked often of the sea, in the off watches. Once, in particular, we spoke of the great abyss, and of the monsters that dwell within it, by legend at least. He had no doubt that they existed. But how, I asked him, and why?
‘I’ve never forgotten his answer: it is the abyss itself that gives birth to them, he said. The monsters, he claimed, are produced by the very deeps – ten miles down and more – in which they grow.
‘Ten miles down! Can you imagine, Mr Amber? The awful weight of it! It was inconceivable to me – as I told my Ship Kings friend – that any living thing could ever withstand such pressure, let alone develop to monstrous size. And even if it did; how could it then rise to the surface, as monsters are purported to do – where there is no pressure – and yet remain intact? Impossible!
‘But my friend had performed cunning experiments. He’d taken small soft-skinned creatures of the shallower seas, eels and squid and the like, and encased them in stout iron pipes filled with water. Then, by means of powerful rams, he’d increased the pressure on that water immensely, to mimic conditions at the bottom of the abyss. Most of the creatures soon died. But some survived, and he noted something amazing about those survivors.
‘Their flesh was changing. It was becoming extraordinarily tough, hardier than the thickest, heaviest leather, and yet still flexible. And the cause was nicre. It was merging into the skin of these creatures!
But how could that be? Nicre, as we know, bonds only with dead wood, not with living timber, and certainly not with living flesh.
‘The explanation? Depth! Depth and pressure! Not the pressure of five or seven miles deep, but of nine miles down and more. At those depths, in the indescribable night of the uttermost abyss, under weights too enormous to comprehend, it seems that nicre is forced into the very pores of living creatures. Their hide, their sinews, their very bones are forged anew, stronger than iron.
‘In short, they become all but indestructible, and all but immortal, too, for nicre does not die. Thus are they free to grow as large as they might, starting from smaller monstrosities perhaps, but swelling over the aeons – feeding upon one another, most likely – until at last there are only a few left, giants beyond all proportion, and famished.’
Dow was as intrigued as he was disturbed. Here was nicre again! He had not forgotten the day, long ago, on board the Chloe, when the scholarly Commander Fidel (and where was he now?) had demonstrated nicre’s four properties to him; its effect upon wood, on warm water, on ice and on iron. Four properties that defined the ocean and the world. And now here was a fifth: the creation of leviathans of the deep . . .
‘There’s a further fact you won’t know,’ observed the captain, pouting at the rum bottle. ‘This very day – by my best reckoning – we crossed over the nine-mile line of depth. You can see it on the charts there yourself, I made the calculations only hours ago. And here I’ve sat since, seeking solace as I may. For we venture now out above the very pits where these monstrous things abide.
‘They are down there, Mr Amber. Directly beneath us as I speak. Deep, deep down, rolling in their slime and ooze, great fins and tails and claws flailing, each large enough to batter this ship to fragments. They have been sleeping – indeed, had we come in summer they would be sleeping yet – but they will be stirring now, and rising up through the middle waters. For their prey has arrived. The whales. The damn whales, singing their damn songs.’
Dow could feel his skin crawling, as if his chair rested upon a nest of spiders – only the truth was worse, for these were unspeakable spiders, down in the darkness. ‘But we’re not a whale,’ he protested. ‘Why would such creatures attack us?’
Fletcher shrugged. ‘It’s true that ships have crossed the abyss unmolested, if history speaks right, even at this time of year. I don’t know why only some are assaulted and others not. I had hoped to be one of the lucky ones. But now that we are here . . . no, I feel it in my bones. Something will come for us.’ He paused to swill once more, then fixed Dow with a reddened eye. ‘If only, Young Admiral, because you are on board.’
‘Me?’
‘Aye. The boy who rode the maelstrom, and defied the Ice, and escaped a Ship Kings death sentence; I do not think that the monsters of the deep will let you pass quietly. And I’m the fool who linked the fate of this voyage to yours! “The great Dow Amber can’t be destined to be lost or drowned in the mere crossing of an ocean,” I said.
Oh, it pleased the crew, and kept that damn Oliver off my back – but I was an idiot to tempt fortune. It may well be exactly your fate to be lost so, and all of us with you.’
Dow groaned silently. Not again. Yes, the captain was only drunk, and it was ridiculous, of course, to suggest that the things below in the dark could somehow be aware of any single person on a ship floating high above them – and yet Dow had been accused of complicity with natural forces before . . . things like the maelstrom, like the Ice Albatross with its golden-black eyes . . .
But not here, please.
Captain Fletcher laughed as if Dow’s silence was statement enough, and rose to his feet, swaying. ‘Sleep well, Mr Amber, if you can over this infernal singing. Oh, I don’t say it will happen tonight. Or the next, or the one after that. We’ve only just crossed the line, after all, and have a thousand miles yet to go. The abyss can afford to be patient. But be assured, at some point before we reach the other side, the chasm will show us its true face.’
And with that, the captain clutched his bottle to his chest, and reeled off towards the privacy of his cabin, with all the drunken dignity of a man who has proved himself inarguably right.
But in one respect he would, in fact, be proved quite wrong. There was indeed no attack upon the Snout that night, or the next night either.
But the abyss was impatient after all. For on only the third night, it came.
7. THE DEVOURER OF WHALES
It lacked but two hours until dawn when the cry went up. ‘Whales! Whales dead ahead!’
Dow, on duty, happened to be on the foredeck at the time, and so peered forward over the bowsprit. Some distance ahead in the night a pale disturbance showed upon the surface of the sea, a churning of the water, as of great bodies milling there. And yes, there were spouts too, dim jets rising.
‘Come a few points right!’ called Commander Harp on the high deck. ‘Lively now!’
The helmsmen strained at the wheel, and the Snout swung to a northwest course. It was a standard manoeuvre; presuming the whales were on a southward path, this would keep them off the left bow and ensure they came no nearer.
The War of the Four Isles Page 14